Do you really need CosmosDB?

Azure has a much cheaper choice they’re trying to hide from you.

Table storage is the unsung hero of Azure’s storage & databasing offerings. Due to Azure pushing its new one-size-fits-all CosmosDB product, table storage is being pushed as a ‘basic’ and inferior version of it. But the truth is, most people don’t care that much about global redundancy. The majority of people are quite happy with the majorly stable nature of regional data centres, and thus are happy to sacrifice GRS for lower operational costs.

For these people, Azure Table Storage should feel like an obvious choice. The speed statistics are insane; if your server functions in the same region as your storage account, the latency for scanning 100,000,000+ records is single digit. Furthermore it only costs $0.90 for 1,000,000 transactions and 5GB a month.

Table Storage is a fantastic database for applications that only require simple query operations (which, when unconstrained by typical SQL schemas, is a surprisingly large share of them). However in my eyes there is one thing that CosmosDB has over Table Storage; CosmosDB is a document database, and Table Storage is a key value database.

That is to say, CosmosDB supports the full spec for JSON objects including nested models and lists.

Table Storage on the other hand stores entities as a collection of key value pairs — supporting only primitive types, no nested models or lists.

Though at first glance this can seem like a rather major con, with a bit of intelligent thought this becomes an easy-to-solve problem. You simply serialise the models! Just create a wrapper around your get & setting of table entries with JSON decoding & encoding.

So think twice before you hit that deploy button for your servers new CosmosDB database. Chances are, all you really need is table storage. With such blistering performance & insanely cheap prices it’s hard to justify choosing anything else unless you actually need a Graph & SQL API. Again, for the same prices as a 10GB CosmosDB account, you get 400% more transactions (50,000,000) & 450% more storage! (450GB ). FYI, that’s $42 a month. Insanity.

Your boss will love you for it ; )

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